Science is not a little thing, a narrow field: it encompasses or confronts all that ever was, is, or shall be, the whole bag of tricks, from a universe 13 billion light years across, to the subatomic world.

How curious, then, that the science book remains a sub-genre, occupying a set of shelves somewhere in non-fiction, usually near the back of the shop; and how curious that it remains separate from literature, as if science writing was not the same as good writing; and as if facts about the world were somehow less thrilling than fictions about it. Novelists observe and describe. But so do naturalists. Poets celebrate, but so do physicists. Historians explain, but so do chemists.

The choice is arbitrary - no Richard Dawkins, no Richard Fortey, no Steven Rose, no Paul Davies, no Jared Diamond or Stephen Jay Gould? - and on another weekend, I might have chosen another list. But if you aspire to any understanding of the world around you, these 10 books offer wider horizons and deeper perceptions, and a chance to revel in the power of language. They were chosen from a pool of books written more than 10 years ago, a test of their staying power - how many of today's new science works will last a decade or more?

1. The Periodic Table Primo Levi,1985

What it says: "One must distrust the almost-the-same (sodium is almost the same as potassium, but with sodium nothing would have happened), the practically identical, the approximate, the or-even, all surrogates and all patchwork. The differences can be small, but they can lead to radically different consequences, like a railroad's switchpoints; the chemist's trade consists in good part in being aware of these differences, knowing them close up, and foreseeing their effects. And not only the chemist's trade."

What it's about: The young Primo Levi nearly burns down a laboratory when he tries to purify benzene with potassium, rather than sodium.

Why you must read it: Forget the soubriquet "science writer": Primo Levi's testament from Auschwitz is unforgettable, and works such as If This Is A Man, and Moments of Reprieve have guaranteed that he will endure. In The Periodic Table - based on his life as an industrial chemist - he shows, as nobody else can, the link between knowing and being, between the palpable world and the human experience, between obdurate reality and human ingenuity. Read him on the chemistry of mine tailings, or the impurities that catalyse reactions, or his desperate attempts - with the rip-off merchandise of postwar Italy - to extract the "Max Factor" factor from chickenshit. Read this book and change your perceptions. As a bonus, lip gloss, industrial varnish and lampblack will never seem the same again.

2. Possible Worlds JBS Haldane ,1927

What it says: "You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mineshaft, and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the 11th storey of a building; a man is killed, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal's length, breadth and height each by 10; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively 10 times greater than the driving force."

What it's about: A great socialist scientist on why you could never have a 50ft woman; why an insect caught in the bath is in deep trouble, and why a man has 100 square yards of lung.

Why you must read it: Haldane was one of the early eugenicists, whose thinking was carried to its cruel, logical conclusion by the Nazis. He was also one of the great explainers, and a startling number of his essays remain not just readable but compelling even across a divide of almost 80 years. That may be because Haldane understood that knowledge had no purpose unless it was shared, and share it he did: in 300 essays for the communist paper the Daily Worker. He migrated to India, and died an Indian citizen, announcing his own death from cancer with a ballad that opened with the unforgettable couplet "I wish I had the voice of Homer/To sing of rectal carcinoma".

3. Gaia: a new look at life on Earth James Lovelock ,1979

What it says: "For as far back as we can measure, the Earth has been close to its present state of chemical neutrality. Mars and Venus, on the other hand, appear very acid in their composition, far too acid for life as it has evolved on our planet. At the present time the biosphere produces up to 1,000 megatons of ammonia each year worldwide. This quantity is close to the amount required to neutralise the strong sulphuric and nitric acids produced by the natural oxidation of sulphur and nitrogen compounds: a coincidence perhaps, but possibly another link in the chain of circumstantial evidence for Gaia's existence."

What it's about: Atmospheric chemist and freelance scientist on how life manages to keep itself in order on a not necessarily helpful planet.

Why you must read it: Some books really do change the world: this may be one of them. Its influence among the eco-warriors and New Agers has been immense, but so has its influence on many geologists, biochemists, geographers and oceanographers. Gaia is only a metaphor - Lovelock is not promoting Bronze Age religion and Earth-mother worship - but it is a powerful one: an image that illuminates the intricate connection between all living things and the ground they must live upon. In this sense, Lovelock argues, the planet itself is alive, and so sustains life on Earth.

4. A Fire on the Moon Norman Mailer, 1970

What it says: "But for the moment, the spaceship does not move. Four giant hold-down arms large as flying buttresses hold to a ring at the base of Saturn V while the thrust of the motors builds up in nine seconds, reaches a power in thrust equal to the weight of the rocket. Does the rocket weigh 6,484,280lb? Now the thrust goes up, the flames pour out, now the thrust is 4m, 5m, 6m pounds, an extra million pounds of thrust each instant as those thousands of gallons of fuel rush each instant to the motors, now it balances at 6,484,280lb. The bulk of Apollo-Saturn is in balance on the pad. Come, you could levitate it with the lift of a finger, but for the hold-down arms."

What it's about: Great American novelist is cleared for take-off with Apollo 11 at Cape Kennedy, 1969.

Why you must read it: There have been many books about Apollo, a high proportion by the contestants in the race to the moon. Mailer was a mere commissioned spectator, and this book was condemned for its literary conceit (the novelist calls himself Aquarius throughout) and its self-indulgence (all that guff about angst and existentialism). But Mailer graduated as an aeronautical engineer, and he wrote what seems now by far the most thrilling account of one of mankind's great adventures.

5. The Double Helix James Watson, 1968

What it says: "As the clock went past midnight, I was becoming more and more pleased. There had been far too many days when Francis and I worried that the DNA structure might turn out to be superficially very dull, suggesting nothing about either its replication or its function in controlling cell biochemistry. But now, to my delight and amazement, the structure was turning out to be profoundly interesting. For over two hours, I lay awake with pairs of adenine residues whirling in front of my closed eyes. Only for brief moments did the fear shoot through me that an idea this good could be wrong."

What it's about: Young American in Cambridge in 1953 prepares to stun the world with the secret of life. Even though his great idea was - in that case - wrong, Watson went on to share the Nobel prize in 1962 with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for the structure of DNA.

Why you must read it: Some hated it, some loved it. Some even said he should not have written it. But The Double Helix remains a compelling account of ruthless science and naked ambition, by a writer honest enough to reveal himself as quite dislikable, but also very effective. Watson always had a gift for putting the great questions of science very simply and clearly: that may in part be why he was then able to provide some of the great answers.

6. The Diversity of Life Edward O Wilson, 1993

What it says: "Day after day, the driver ants scythe through the animal life around their bivouac. They reduce its biomass and change the proportions of species. The most active flying insects escape. So do invertebrate animals too small to be noticed by the ants, particularly roundworms, mites and spring tails. Other insects and invertebrates are hard hit. One driver ant colony, comprising as many as 20m workers - all daughters of a single mother queen - is a heavy burden for the ecosystem to bear. Even the insectivorous birds must fly to a different spot to find food. It has become clear that an elite group of species exercises an influence on biological diversity out of all proportion to its numbers."

What it's about: Ant man Wilson, a member of the biology elite, on just who gets to be king of the jungle, and the wider problems of co-existence in a crowded world.

Why you must read it: Biologists call this age the "sixth great extinction". The quiet disappearance of creatures great and small may be even more damaging in the long run than either climate change or global terrorism. But you wouldn't necessarily know that from the political debate. Wilson, the one-eyed visionary who launched the idea of "sociobiology" - that all human behaviour could be explained as an evolutionary outcome - has provided one of the best introductions to the richness and interdependence of all life on Earth.

7. The Language Instinct Steven Pinker, 1994

What it says: "Word learning generally begins around the age of 12 months. Therefore, high school graduates, who have been at it for about 17 years, must have been learning an average of 10 new words a day, continuously since their first birthday, or about a new word every 90 waking minutes. Using similar techniques, we can estimate that an average six-year-old commands about 13,000 words (notwithstanding those dull, dull Dick and Jane primers, which were based on ridiculously lowball estimates). A bit of arithmetic shows that preliterate children, who are limited to ambient speech, must be lexical vacuum cleaners, inhaling a new word every waking two hours, day in, day out."

What it's about: The average US high school graduate knows 60,000 words. Shakespeare used only 15,000 in the entire Avon catalogue. A psychologist addresses some of the enigmas of language.

Why you must read it: In the beginning was the word, followed rapidly by a sense of word order that seems to be innate, at least in young children. Where do the rules of language come from? How do we know what sentences mean? Pinker's questions are not new, and his answers are not always convincing, but this is an almost heroic attempt to encompass the unique creation of the human mind. With its use of newspaper headlines such as "Drunk gets six months in violin case" or "Iraqi head seeks arms", it is also the wittiest.

8. Profiles of the Future Arthur C Clarke, 1982

What it says: "When you fall freely under Earth's gravity, you are increasing speed at 22mph every second - but you do not feel anything at all. This would be true no matter how intense the gravity field; if you were dropped toward Jupiter, you would accelerate at 60mph every second, for Jupiter's gravity is two and a half times Earth's. Near the sun you would increase speed at the rate of 600mph each second, but you would feel no force acting upon you. There are stars - white dwarfs - with gravity fields more than a thousand times as strong as Jupiter's; in the vicinity of such a star you might add 100,000mph to your speed every second without the slightest discomfort - until, of course, it was time to pull out."

What it's about: The sage of Sri Lanka tackles the challenges of travelling at light speed, teleportation, gravity control, time, space, invisibility and the sheer difficulty of foretelling the future. Second revised edition.

Why you must read it: Arthur C Clarke, who proposed telecommunications satellites a decade before Sputnik 1, has been effervescing about the possibilities of science for six decades. Sometimes he seems to be writing the same books, again and again. But maybe that's because they were such good books in the first place, that they could survive updating every decade or so. This one is as neat a demonstration of the Arthurian cycle as any book in the Clarke canon, and as stimulating.

9. The Language of the Genes Steve Jones, 1993

What it says: "All populations outside Africa, from Britain to Tahiti, share a few common sequences of DNA. Within Africa, there is a different pattern of distribution. Just like the names of the Johannesburg telephone book, compared to that of Amsterdam, the shift in the pattern from the ancestral continent to its descendants may be a relic of a population bottleneck at the time of migration - this time, from, rather than to, Africa. We can do some statistics (and make quite a lot of guesses) to work out the size of this hundred-thousand-year-old event. They show that the whole of the world's population outside Africa may descend from a group of less than 100 emigrants. If this is true, non-Africans were once an endangered species."

What it's about: Snail-loving geneticist turns to the telephone book for evidence of genetic origins, and starts to find some missing numbers in the great story of human descent.

Why you must read it: The revolution begun by Crick and Watson has ended with a new way of reading human history: and not only human history. In one of the fastest-moving fields of science, Jones' book still seems up to date, and this must be one of the best introductions to the subject, by someone with a keen sense of human variety (on one page opened at random, you can find George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Shakespeare's Caliban and Johann Sebastian Bach.

10. The Making of the Atomic Bomb Richard Rhodes, 1986

What it says: "The calculations Serber reported indicated a critical mass for metallic U235 tamped with a thick shell of ordinary uranium of 15kg: 33 pounds. For plutonium similarly tamped the critical mass might be 5 kilograms: 11lb. The heart of their atomic bomb would then be a cantaloupe of U235 or an orange of Pu239 surrounded by a watermelon of ordinary uranium tamper, the combined diameter of the two nested spheres about 18in. Shaped of such heavy metal the tamper would weigh about a ton."

What it's about: The Manhattan Project was born out of a nightmare in Europe and it ended with warheads that dominated history for the next six decades. Rhodes's book is a story of metal, men and mastery of the atom.

Why you must read it: Like the moon landings, the Manhattan Project was big science: a drama on three continents, decades in the making, its last act embracing just a few hectic years and a mushroom-shaped cloud that signalled a new age to a horrified world. This is another great book about how science happens, and why, and about the regrets and anxieties, too, of the men and women who make it happen. This is an epic, with a cast of thousands, but it reads with the pace of a thriller.

Competition

Thanks to Amazon.co.uk, you can win all 10 of Tim Radford's top science books. All you have to do is tell us: what book did Tim miss? And why, in 25 words or fewer, should it make the list?

1. To enter the competition, answer the question in the edition of Life of 27th January 2005 and send it to Top Science Books Competition, Life, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER or email your answer to Life@theguardian.com with "Top Science Books Competition" in the subject field.

2. All entries must be received by noon, Thursday February 10th 2005.

3. Entrants must include their name, address and daytime phone number when submitting their entries.

4. There is one prize of ten books, which the winner will receive from Amazon.co.uk.

5. The winning answer will be published in the Life of 17 February, 2005. The winner's name will be available on request to life@theguardian.com.

6. The competition is open to residents of the UK aged 18 and over.

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10. The winner will be the most original and interesting entry. The decision of the Life Editor will be final and no correspondence will be entered into.

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